Computation of Sankara

[Dominik Wujastyk]

David Dargie said:
> 
> Presently I am enrolled as a PhD student at the University of Queensland,
> Australia. My topic involves a 'computational linguistic' approach to
> Sanskrit texts, particularly commentarial texts such as Sankara's
> commentaries and works of similar vintage and style.
>
Delighted to hear of another Sanskritist in Australia!

The discussion about Sankara wasn't really meant, I think, to say that
too much has been done on him.  Sankara's vedanta is still a very rich
and worthwhile area of study, in my view.  I have always, too, thought
that the corpus of Sankara's commentaries were an ideal case for
developing some authorship criteria using the methods of computational
linguistics.  You have a large enough corpus of material that everyone
agrees is by the man himself, so you can develop some kind of
"fingerprint."  Then there are important texts whose authorship people
wonder about, like Upadesasahasri etc.  It would be extremely
interesting to have some statistics about congruence (or otherwise) of
these texts with the commentarial corpus.  Finally, Sankara is so
important that any real results in this area will be extremely valuable.

Good project!  Keep us posted.

Dominik